Are you kicking yourself because you missed Hunt for Justice? Well, we're re-running it. So if you missed it the first time and are now thinking something like "Awwww, if I'd known there were going t...

Puzzzle Hunts are Everywhere thanks to USPS
There was a puzzlehunt-by-mail recently, the Hunt for Justice. It was mostly done by other folks, but I did some things. I designed one of its puzzles, collaborating with other GC folks. I helped ou...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even your mailbox
Matt Cleinman sent this out to some of the usual mailing lists: Gather your team! Registration has just opened for the Hunt for Justice, an October solve-at-home puzzlehunt. Almost none of the puzz...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Fremont
Once again, I traveled to volunteer at DASH, that puzzlehunt that takes place in many, many cities nationwi worldwide. This year, I didn't "travel" very far: the first GC to ask for a volunteer was i...

I was abstractly tsk-ing the rumors that Yahoo had stopped forwarding email until I remembered that a couple of SF Bay Area puzzlehunt mailing lists are on Yahoo Groups. Hmm, when I go visit puzzleh...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Walnut Creek
You might think that my photo-taking efforts were stymied when I dropped my camera in that abandoned fast food restaurant's parking lot and the battery popped out. But nay, here are some photos of Gh...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Mateo
Behold, it is photos of BANG 35, that puzzlehunt that took place in San Mateo. Well, there are photos from the second weekend, when I was GC-site-volunteering. The first weekend, I was playing&hellip...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even DC Metro
I am back from Washington DC. I have puzzler gossip. Folks there are organizing a series of afternoon hunts, a la BANG or SNAP or BAPHL. At the start of Washington DC DASH, Todd Etter and Evan Davis ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even not-Redmond
Some California folks got together over the weekend to playtest the upcoming Microsoft Puzzlehunt. Staying spoiler-free, I wrote some stuff about it, but only the bits around the experience, as it we...

Bonus Telegraph Hill Hunt Puzzle: Gerke Alley
I rough-drafted many puzzles for the Telegraph Hill Hunt BANG that didn't make it in. That's expected. Most of them, I'm happy to leave by the wayside. Some of them, I'm happy to hang onto for some f...

Book Report: San Francisco's Telegraph Hill
It's a book about San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. I was interested because I wanted a puzzle hunt there. This book talked about local history. Back in the day, before folks had Facebook ...

When we ran that Telegraph Hill Hunt game a few months back, we started in San Francisco's Washington Square. Not wanting the cops to roust us from the park, we sought permits. But in the end, we did...

Link: How to Host a BANG
A few days back, someone added some good material to the How to Host a BANG wiki. I've since made some little edits on things I had specialized knowledge about—e.g., if you're running an el-che...

Jotting Notes on Sara Thacher's ADG Talk
She designs experiences. She worked on the Games of Nonchalance, Futurecoast; nowadays she can't tell us about her exciting work in Disney Imagineering. Barthe's Death of the Author: just because yo...

Last night's playtest of the Black Rock City playtest was fun. I collaborated with folks I knew but mostly folks I didn't, as you might imagine happening at Burning Man where you're wandering around ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even BRC
"Aug 30-Sep 7 Puzzle Hunt at Burning Man Black Rock City, NV If you go, you'll know it when you see it." –Puzzle Hunt Calendar No, I'm not going to Burning Man. But if you are, now you can re...

Novice, Novicer, Novicest
I was site-monitoring at a puzzle hunt. Things were quieting down at the site: Most of the teams had solved and gone on. Not all, though. Those that remained were novices, still learning the puzzlehu...

Puzzlehunt Pacing
I bumped into Allen Cohn on BART yesterday. We got to talking about puzzlehunt pacing. If you have some easy breezy puzzles and some tough slog puzzles, how do you order them so that players have fun...

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, even Austin
Once again I site-volunteered with the first DASH GC who responded to an email. This year: DASH 7 in Austin TX. This was my first time in Austin, so I took a few days to wander around and gawk a...

Book Report: How to Puzzle Cache
How to Puzzle Cache teaches you how to decode/decipher/unpuzzle many, many ways of hiding secret messages. I'm a puzzlehunter, so I was reading it and thinking it's useful for puzzlehunting. It's int...

BAPHL has a wiki!
Nathan Curtis mailed the baphl-announce mailing list with good news: …I wanted to let you know about a resource that Hubert set up for us. The BAPHL website now has a wiki. Visit http://www....

Link: Photoset of Chicago 2013 Puzzle Hunt
It's 2015. Why am I only now seeing these photos of a 2013 Chicago puzzlehunt? Because I'm a nerd even when touring (touristing?), I recognized those library stacks. ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even ExitGames.co.uk
It's not just about escape-the-room games: This site has launched a major new section that has always been intended to be one of its primary focuses. This site talks about puzzle hunts frequently, ...

One Year of Octothorpean
The Octothorpean online puzzle-hunt launched a year ago today. How have things gone since then? Pretty well, I think. On the other hand, for the goals I had… They're not so easy to measure. S...

My Hobby's been De-Skilled
OK, I'm exaggerating. But here's what I'm talking about: If your puzzlehunt has an automatic answer-checker app, then your site monitors don't have much to do. I and some of the other Davis site volu...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Musha Cay
My parents forwarded me this article about Adventure activities for travelers. Every few months, at Musha Cay, a private resort in the Bahamas owned by David Copperfield, the magician gathers his g...

Puzzle Hunts were Everywhere, even Hayes Valley
Behold, it is most of the puzzles from the 2014 #terngame, a.k.a. Twitter's annual puzzlehunt. I say "most" of the puzzles because there were a couple of "you had to be there" puzzles. Like the one t...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Oakham
Puzzlehunters of the world, the Oakhammites of Oakham are calling us out: Well-heeled readers from further afield might also note that this event is one week before the Armchair Treasure Hunt Clubâ€...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Marin County
Behold, it is my write-up of Shinteki Decathlon 9! Read them to gain great insight into puzzlehunting a la "Oh man I wish the Army Corps of Engineers would install air conditioning in the Bay Model."...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Mountain View
Want to try some puzzles from Shinteki Decathlon 9 (a.k.a. that puzzlehunt I played in last weekend)? Can you be in Mountain View for a few hours on June 28?* If you missed the recent Shinteki Deca...

Book Report: Puzzle Craft
"The subtitle's a lie, of course. We can't fit descriptions of how to make every type of puzzle into one book." And yet this book does show examples of many many kinds of puzzles. Along with each exa...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Davis
Once again, I used the DASH puzzlehunt as an excuse to travel. This year, I site-volunteered for DASH 6 at Davis, California. You can read about DASH at Davis and marvel at photos and perhaps start a...

Book Report: Don't Get Too Comfortable
It's essays by David Rakoff. The first few in the collection were so unenthusiastic about everything that I wondered how did this end up on my to-read list? Then I was reminded: this collection inclu...

ClueKeeper's got hunts up in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Richmond VA, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Telluride. I got excited and started playing the San Francisco one. Which was silly, I should have...

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, Even Davis
Davis is a ~1.5 hour train ride out of the SF Bay Area; when the Hogwarts Game put folks on a train to Sacramento, that train passed through Davis. Until recently, I hadn't spent much time in Davis; ...

My modeling career continues
At first I wasn't sure it was me in this image from the excellent (recently redesigned!) Shinteki puzzlehunt website. I recognized Dan and Jesse sure, but the guy behind Jesse is pretty grayed out. ...

Link: confirmation
A blog post in which a puzzler reflects on the lack of utility of knowing trivia for Mystery Hunt. …people wanted confirmation. They didn’t trust my knowledge while there was a way to confir...

Book Report: Little Brother
Remind yourself it's fiction: after a terrorist attack, the DHS goes police state on San Francisco. That part's all too believable. The less-believable part: our hero is a teenaged computer programme...

Book Report: Shady Characters
Thursday afternoon, talk at work turned to punctuation. Since work uses a lot of @s and #s, this should not surprise you. Someone hazily remembered that Shakespeare had invented “modern quotati...

Suppose octothorpean.org had photos of you and/or other puzzle nerd teams at various puzzle-y places. Where would be a good place for those photos? Soon-ish, Octothorpean will reward you for sending...

ClueKeeper Looks Awesome
I tried out ClueKeeper to see how it was coming along. tl;dr: pretty darned nicely. Cluekeeper's an answer-checking program for puzzlehunts, reminiscent of Shinteki's LEON—and in the most recen...

Link: 2014 #mysteryhunt IT and Infrastructure
It's a blog post by an Alice Shrugged team member about keeping their team-puzzle-state server up and running. We need jargon for this. HintOps? Solutions Reliability Engineering? ...

Have you ever volunteered at a puzzle hunt? Have you not-yet filled out Deb's survey of such volunteers? For goodness' sake, fill it out. Especially the part about things Game Control can do to make ...

Some folks are playing @octothorpean during #mysteryhunt and that's OK. Puzzle Hunts are everwhere and, between them, welcome folks of all puzzling experience levels. When Octothorpean opened up a co...

I added a puzzle to Octothorpean this weekend. It took longer to figure out where to put the puzzle than it did to write the puzzle itself. I wanted to add a puzzle close to the beginning of Octothor...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Downtown SF
That @Mastermindhunts San Francisco hunt was the real deal. Yeah, yeah—they mostly run short hunts for not-so-puzzly people. But but but hey I'm telling you—they also run some more seriou...

Over-Engineered Walks: Munzee Addendum
Last week, the Munzee folks must have spidey-sensed that a puzzle-hunt enthusiast was writing about their geocaching-in-the-age-of-smartphones game. We know this because soon afterwards, they launche...

This isn't Even my Final Form
In last week's SnoutCast, DeeAnn mused on the recent "save the date" announcement for the Octothorpean Order Opening Day (November 16!): "It's going to be very interesting to see it in its—I ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Amazon.com
Sounds like Amazon has a puzzle hunt, as nicely chronicled in this blog post: Amazon Puzzle Hunt 2013! Sounds mostly conference room-ish. I haven't found much else about it. Searching the interwebs f...

A few of the usual puzzle-huntists played SCRAP's 1000 Treasure Hunters today; I was one of them. (SCRAP is the organization behind the Real Escape game.) We had a lot of fun! As is usual for SCRAP-i...

Urban Morphology is Everywhere, Even Truckee
Dave writes: "I wanted to make a puzzle using the parking meters but they changed while I was developing the puzzle and the new look has much less information." That gets a sympathetic chuckle from ...

Link: Truckee Puzzle Hunt
The puzzle hunt in Truckee? The one coming up August 17? It has a blog. It's had one for a while, apparently. I could'a sworn it used to just be an announcement or something. ...

Link: Puzzle Pile interview about Lumber Party
In which we find out that The Octothorpean Order is partly about puzzles but also partly about instructional design, human cognition, and the limited power of written instruction to inspire action. T...

It's Afternoon at Isotope a.k.a., one GC member's write-up about about #terngame 2013. I don't know how coherent it is, but by golly if I don't write it down now, I bet that this week's going to expu...

Lumber Party: a Quick Online Puzzle Hunt
If you enjoy puzzles, you might set aside some time on the 21st (a Sunday) for Lumber Party. It'll be a chance to solve a self-contained arc of puzzles from the Octothorpean Order (which continues to...

I listened to the "Famine Game Reaping" snoutcast and then posted a question in the form of a personal failure of imagination: What if you were a GC running an application process and you wanted some...

Wow, a third of my theoretically-Shinteki Decathlon photos this year are actually of things that happened on the way to Shinteki Decathlon. That's a little silly, but that's how it goes. Of course, n...

DASH LAX 2013 photos
DASH5 was a couple of weeks ago, remember? I went to LA to help out. Along the way, I took some photos: DASH LAX 2013. One of the folks there, Francis Hsu, was volunteering in Los Angeles and then vo...

Playtesting continues apace. A small subset of the DRT (Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs) tore through many, many puzzles, as you might expect. Of course, it was tricky figuring out how to transform their...

I played a @mastermindhunts public pub hunt and it was fun! I got to play with Tiffany Dohzen and Andrea Burbank. (I kinda think maybe Mystic Fish has been thrown together with Andrea's on some puzzl...

Taking Shape (where the shape is #)
Months ago, excellent partly-puzzlehunt-naive team Drop_Table was the (brave!) first playtest team of the Octothorpean Game. It took a long time to incorporate their feedback. The game has many, many...

Looking for Group: Ravenchase Great America Hunt
Are you putting together a team for Ravenchase's Great America Hunt? I wanna play. You should pick me for your team. The good news: Scurrying around all day solving puzzles seems normal to me. The ...

I'm just back from GC Summit 2013, in which Game Control folks talk about how to run games without going crazy...crazier than necessary. Folks presented on a cool variety of games this year. Well, th...

Newbie Game RFP
There's this sketch of an online puzzlehunt that's aimed at puzzlehunt newbies—it doesn't expect teams to be able to recognize, e.g., semaphore flags. This game would stick around—if, yea...

Playtest went well. Wow, I figured folks would conk out after an hour or two, but they just kept going and going. Not everything got tested with n00bs; some folks showed up who'd played in puzzlehunt...

Richard Benjamin on "The Last of Sheila"
The A.V. Club isn't completely worthless without their crossword. They interviewed the actor Richard Benjamin about, among other things, "The Last of Sheila." Mostly stuff that you already knew, sure...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even SOMA
As part of the Come Out and Play festival, the Idryos ran the Black Bart's Hidden Hoard Game. My team conked out early, but I got a blurry photo (and three not-so-blurry ones). ...

Message to Puzzlehunter Wanna-Bes
Someone smart asked for some draft email text they could to a San Francisco-area puzzlehunter wanna-be. So I wrote this: Playing in puzzlehunts is fun, but can be kinda like diving into the deep en...

Wanted: Wanna-Be Puzzlehunters near SF
You've had this conversation. They ask you what you did last weekend. You say you puzzlehunted. They say OMG that sounds amazing, I wanna play. You encourage them to look at some MIT Mystery Hunt puz...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even NYC
New York's opening-soon Museum of Math is holding a puzzlehunt December 16th. On the one hand, I'm theoretically not interested, since the hunt is targeted at teen novices. On the other hand, MoMath ...

Link: SpliceVine interview with Sara Thacher
@thacher is a big name in the @jejuneinstitute game and other TransMedia experience/game/thingies. This site about video editing(?!) interviewed her, and she mentions an early influence: Janet Cardif...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Portland
*SPOILERS* Do you plan to play a game with Los Jefes? If so, beware of spoilers. I just posted a write-up about playing with them in the WarTron Game. After reading that write-up, you'll lose the fe...

Book Report: The Puzzler's Mansion
It's the third Winston Breen novel. Thus, it's a YA puzzle mystery. It's pretty awesome having a puzzlehunter protagonist who actually thinks like a puzzlehunter. E.g., he's at a puzzlehunt put on b...

@_dev_joe, maintainer of the MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Index,, has announced an update. More puzzles, more organized, plus a tidbit especially interesting to me since I haven't played in the Mystery Hu...

This week's snoutcast had an interesting tidbit "future events: bikes? Seattle? stay tuned!" And also some thoughts on puzzle-based learning if you're an educator. They're interviewing a math teache...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Jose
BANG 33 will be a good puzzlehunt; you should register to play it September 29. It's a re-run; I played it some weeks ago. The good part about remembering it is that it makes me smile. The bad part a...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Chicago
@rocketlass took some awesome photos of a puzzlehunt at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo which was maybe called "The Case of the Fabulous Fauna" or maybe that was just a clever name for the photo set. Don'...

WarTron Photos
I took photos at The WarTron Game. Other folks took photos of the WarTron Game. Please enjoy these photos of the WarTron Game. Special Bonus: also my Portland travelog of the stuff I did before WarTr...

Pencil Bandolier: Overloaded
The other day I'm walking along and thinking Well it was quite a coincidence running into her here because (1) when am I ever in the Mission and (2) she moved to Switzerland which would normally be e...

Link: Ravenchase Great America Race writeup
A team of west-coast puzzlehuntists played through the whole Ravenchase Great America Race last week, solving in cities from Washington DC to Boston. They blogged the race, mostly posting a writeup t...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even London
DASH, the pan-USA puzzlehunt, is coming to London next year. So next year when I ask the DASH GCs "What city could use another volunteer? Tell me where I'm going on vacation this year." I might end u...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Portland
#wartron was pretty superb and Team Los Jefes was a great team to play with. Portland has some great locations, so there was a lot of "wow" as we piled out of the van. (I'm not sure that I recommend ...

Tron and WarGames: really thick doors
I'm "researching" for WarTron. I.e., I'm watching movies while waiting for batteries to recharge so that I can bring lots of batteries. I re-watched WarGames and Tron. Looking for elements in common....

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even St Louis
You must enjoy this St Louis travelog, aka how I traveled to DASH4. And it's also my report on DASH4 itself. Remember when I micro-blogged about tornado warning sirens? I wasn't kidding. ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen in San Mateo
Because the dream of the 80s is also alive at Paine Memorial High School, here's a write-up of the Doctor When Game, a pretty amazing weekend-long puzzle-hunt time-travel-story game a bunch of folks ...

Book Report: This is not a Game
Thanks to a Snoutcast interview, I learned of the existence of This Is Not A Game, a non-fiction book about Alternative Reality Games by Dave Szulborski (not to be confused with the novel This is Not...

Sorry About That
So as Team Mystic Fish sat down at the finale of the role-playing-intense The Game earlier today, someone seated behind us cracked a joke: "Oh, you're sitting in the front row. So you inherit ou...

Book Report: The Timetables of History
It's a summary of world history, presented as a timeline. It's a few hunded pages. The rows are years. The columns are different, uhm, sectors of culture: art, science, etc. I hear tell that this is...

Spoiler-Free Real Escape Game Notes
Team Sharkbait was there! Well, they played the session before us. Rock on, Team Sharkbait. The toughest thing I did all night was give up a spot on the team with people I knew. Leading up to the ga...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
Is [some of] your team hoping to head to Portland for The WarTron Game? If so, I'd like to tag along as an "embedded reporter". I.e., I'd play the game with y'all and write it up afterwards. Folks ar...

Someone solved the 2-Tone Game meta yesterday, ~6 months since the previous time someone solved it. Hmm, just a few days after I mailed the Real Escape Game info-line to say "You should play this gam...

Even SF Japantown
Who else wants to play @realegame? It's ~1.5 hours long with about an hour of team puzzling in SF Japantown. They're running a few sessions, so you can choose when you want to play. Most of those ses...

Book Report: The Seventh Level
It's more puzzle-hunt young adult fiction by Jody Feldman. You remember how I liked her Gollywhopper Games book, aside from the magical realism parts? This book has a school that's also somehow the h...

Book Report: The Gollywhopper Games
It's young adult fiction answering the question: What would happen if there was a puzzle hunt in a toy warehouse that was magical like Charlie's Chocolate Factory? On the one hand I wanted to read th...

kinda-Puzzle-Hunts are everywhere, even SFMOMA
I went to SFMOMA today to play their ArtGameLab games that I mentioned a couple of days ago. Though I only actually played the Bedcannon Game, a fun scavenger hunt in the permanent gallery plus a hi...

WHO SF Bay Area re-run Writeup
By the time you finished playing the World Henchmen Organization game a couple of months back, most of the mysteries had been wrapped up. Which supervillain betrayed Big Boss. Who was Big Boss? Can t...

Just got back from the Mystic Fish interview with the folks from the Trenchwood Institute. Glad we weren't following Team Lowkey. It looked like they had some kind of art/science thing going on that ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Morgan Hill
Hey Seattle puzzle people: don't click the link in this blog post. I'm talking about a BANG, but some SNAPpish folks are talking about re-running this event in Seattle. Actually, you know what? Don't...

List of Puzzlehunt Team Names
I threw together a list of puzzlehunt team names, gathering names from a bunch of old game signup sheets and results pages. I didn't try to "combine" clusters like { Burninators, The Burninators...

There was finally an entry puzzle on The Master Theorem simple enough such that even I could solve it. I kinda wish that had happened before DASH3, where I met one of the Master Theorem guys. Because...

USPS-mailed some puzzle printouts to a hotel so that (I hope) some out-of-towners in town for Shinteki can use them to play 2-Tone on Friday without having to slow down to print stuff out at a Kinko...

DASH3 NYC Photos
Buddhists would say that I should live in the now, but jetlag says otherwise. I'm sleepy as if I were three hours in the future. But I guess I'm awake enough to cull and crop some photos and then sho...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco
I saw an interesting flyer on 9th Avenue today. I haven't done much with it, so it might not turn out to be as interesting as I hope it is. And I early on encountered an instruction which prevents me...

My Ubuntu box auto-updated a bunch of packages with names like "libavcodec" and "ffmpega". Hey those got mentioned on all those troubleshooting pages with which I totally failed to use Pitivi edit a ...

I'm trying to figure out if I'm set up to shoot and edit simple home videos. This Linux distro comes with a video editor called "Pitivi". As near as I can tell, that name is short for "I piti the foo...

Book Report: The Art of Game Design
The Art of Game Design is pretty awesome. This book is about design. In theory, it's about game design. But if you're designing something for humans, this book contains plenty of wisdom. I think thi...

2-Tone Game: What do you want to know?
Suppose I gave a short talk on the 2-Tone Game at the upcoming GC Summit. What would you want to hear about? Yeah, I wrote designer's notes, but those are hard to slog through. Yeah, the Snoutcast fo...

I Dare you to Travel to DASH
DASH is a puzzle hunt that's held in several cities. Last year, Deb, one of the bay area organizers, flew to NYC where GC was short-handed. She had fun, got to know some puzzle freaks, and she knew ...

Ghost Patrol BA'NG: some photos and a line chart
I posted some notes about Ghost Patrol BA'NG, mostly some photos from one of the puzzle-construction parties. I attended two puzzle-construction parties. (But during the second one, I didn't work mu...

Question for GCs: Observing Playtesters
The latest episode of Snoutcast is about location scouting for games. But my brain got ahold of one little twist in the conversation, and then drifted off to a little incident and then... Like, when...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Bvrlingame
Behold, it is a handful of photos from BANG23. You notice how I'm carefully staying ambiguous about whether there's a full writeup coming anytime soon? Let's see how long it takes me to finish writi...

Book Report: This is not a Game
It's a thriller/mystery, so you wouldn't expect me to like it. But the main characters are Game Control for some big Alternate Reality Games a la I Like Bees. So along the way, there are diverting m...

Fear and Loathing in Alternate Reality
Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for act two of the Games of Nonchalance a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful...

Link: Snoutcast
If you're wondering What is this mysterious "conversation" for which Larry felt he needed to come up with "talking points" ahead of time? the truth can now be revealed: it was a Snoutcast interview. ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, albeit one less place
Corby sent me mail yesterday: some of the environmental data for the 2-Tone Game went away. I was already planning to take today as a vacation day, so now I had a morning activity. Confirm that the...

Shinteki Decathlon Photos
Behold some photos from Shinteki Decathlon 6. I played last weekend, volunteered this weekend. It was pretty awesome. I got to see some places in San Francisco I hadn't visited before. Speaking o...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Decaying
You remember how I wrote that Blood and Bones behaved particularly classily on a spaceship-sized climbing structure? That climbing structure is gone now, it's just a big sandpit at the bottom of som...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Sharing Space
After the playtest on Saturday, we walked and talked with Debbie. We talked about the Jejune Institute, which Debbie and Sunshine had played; the rest of us had not. I'd seen mention of Jejune on C...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, like Lindy Hop
Yesterday, Debbie Goldstein was at a playtest and so was I. And thus I got to hear a little about her trip to New York City. Debbie is, as near as I can tell, the force of cajolery behind the DASH ...

Book Report: Pervasive Games (Theory and Design)
Several months ago, I ran into a little post from a blog called "Pervasive Games". The blog post was interesting, so I wrote a little blog post about that, as one does. But I didn't really notice th...

2-Tone Game: Pacing
Yar wrote some email talking about the 2-Tone Game. One of my answers got pretty long. I guess eventually it should find its way into a game write-up. But it won't if I lose it in my old mail queu...

Link: Blue Door Puzzle Trail
I ego-surfed for mentions of the 2 Tone Game, and found one: a post on an ARG (Alternate Reality Gaming) forum. (Thanks for that!) The poster there called the 2 Tone Game a "puzzle trail". Apparen...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Disneyland
Excerpt from the bottom of Matt Haughey's Disneyland travelog Another highlight of the trip was using the Wishing Stars iPhone app in the park. It's basically a photo and clue-driven scavenger hunt ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Rashomon Gate
The BANG 25 Writeup Addendum over at Puzzalot gets into a tricky aspect of team puzzle-solving: figuring out who had which insight. It's a hard problem; I've given up on it myself. If Player A tell...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere simultaneously
I posted some notes on DASH #1. There's a photo. This would be a good time for me to mention: "playdash". (My DASH photo is not as cool as the photo of Jack o Lanterns including one with a hi...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even in the News
Alert reader Mahlen spotted this article at SFGate, an essay by Dave Blum of Dr Clue: ..."The Amazing Race" definitely has boosted interest in treasure hunts, but that sort of competition and dysfu...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Tampa
A few years back, I pointed out a multi-day Game shaping up in New Zealand with a bionic theme. That game never came together. But all was not lost! Eagle-eyed Justin Graham got word: The GC for tha...

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, even my Parents' House
Yeah, I should really work on a write-up about BANG XX. But today I hung out with family. My cousin Nancy, her husband, and her son came over to my parents' place for a visit, staying last night &a...

Link: XXX, Poison Picnic Puzzlehunts
I'm not cool enough to attend SXSW, but when folks there twitter about attending a puzzlehunt lecture, I pay attention. A lecture about puzzlehunts, forsooth. Apparently, a couple of folks put togeth...

Link: McGuffin GC post
Burninator Corey dug out some notes from being GC on the excellent The McGuffin Game. Some good stuff in there for aspiring GC folks, I bet. Securing a location is a lot like investing: it doesn't...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Jose
I like The Game. I like the puzzles, but in between puzzles, I like hopping into a van and zipping around, visiting interesting places. Even though... all too often we don't really linger at the in...

Link: Arising like a Phoenix from a Bathtub
Further evidence of Darcy's ongoing awesomeness: she rescued the contents of the team Taft on a Raft web site. It's back! Including the material from the The Apprentice Zorg game! If you sadly too...

Ghost Patrol Links, including Photos
Yeah, yeah, you were waiting for the Ghost Patrol results, but me, I was waiting for Wesley's photos. And he posted them: Wes Chan's Ghost Patrol photos. Mostly photos of puzzles and of our team (M...

Link: Muppet Movie Game Blog
I was was avoiding linking to the Muppet Movie Game Site, but have since figured out that was dumb of me. You might say I avoided linking them due to philisophical differences... but really it was m...

Ghost Patrol: It was awesome, yes
The Ghost Patrol Game was awesome. You just want to lock the creators up in a basement somewhere and force them to crank out more of these things. Uhm, but that would be wrong. Anyhow, there's a wr...

Link: Ghost Patrol Application from Mystic Ghosti
You won't find the Mystic Ghosti application on YouTube because... it's not a video. We played to our strengths, creating a ghost-capturing cryptic crossword. Where by "we", I mean "not me". My "c...

Link: BANG Suddenly Looming on Horizon
As one of the bureaucrats of the Bay Area Night Game wiki, I sleepily go through my chores. My feed reader monitors the "recent changes" section of the wiki. When it detects something, I go to the ...

Site Update: The Smoking GNU: Back to Basics
You are, of course, far too tactful to point out that it took me over two months to write up the wacky fun times playing in the Midnight Madness game with The Smoking GNU. It takes a while to write ...

Puzzle Hunts were Everywhen, even 1973
Holy #$!) check it out: It's old Game invites to pre-Midnight Madness 1970s Don Luskin et. al puzzle-y Games! And newspaper articles describing those games! It seems like they were pretty heavy on ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Minneapolis
Remember a while back, I mentioned SF0, a not-really-a-puzzle-hunt dealie, more of a mutual-dare society? Well some folks on SF0 bridged the gap to puzzlehuntdom: they hosted a puzzle hunt in Minnea...

Site Update: a Pretty Plain Code Cheatsheet
I made a pretty plain code cheatsheet for puzzlehunts. It doesn't have all the codes you want, but it has the biggies and it's not too crowded. PDF is here: http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/friv...

PuzzleHunters.com : Register or be Anti-Social
Behold a lovely forum for discussing puzzle hunts, puzzle magazines, and stranger things. It's new, so there's not much there yet. Scott Blomquist set it up and seeks your frankest feedback. He wri...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco
I posted some notes on the excellent SF Minigame. There's one photo. Usually I have zero photos or many photos. This time, one. In other news, yesterday The Great Urban Race came to San Francisco...

Just Three Shinteki Photos
I didn't take any Shinteki photos. That's not quite true. I took a photo of an easel while GC was still setting up. Then Brent put a cover over the easel, like folks weren't supposed to see it so ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Overhead
This past weekend was the excellent Midnight Madness: Back to Basics Game. I'll post photos soon, a write-up eventually. Yes, yes, I'm slow. But I'll post about one thing now, because it happened ...

David Hill on Hypotheses and Blurting
David Hill replied to yesterday's blog post on hypotheses in puzzle-solving. He replied on Facebook, so you probably didn't see it. I'll post his reply here. I have a couple of reasons for wanting...

Embedded Reporter Seeks Team
Is your team playing in the upcoming Back to Basics/Midnight Madness game on April 5? Would you let me play with your team and then write about it afterwards? If so, please get in touch with me (we...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Bless Them
Traffic was bad this evening; my commute was long; I emerged from the bus nauseous. That happens when the commute goes too long: stare at the laptop screen too long while on a moving vehicle, don't ...

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere: Save the Burninators
In case you're wondering why my Facebook Status says "Save the Burninators", I just finished an IM conversation with Ian Tullis. He says that most of the Burninators headed into San Francisco this m...

Site: Seattle Travelog #13
The exciting news lately is that I've had free time and I've been keeping solid food down. Thus, I've finally put together travel notes from my recent Seattle trip. There are some notes from MS Puz...

Site: Shinteki Decathlon 3 Notes
I was talking with Matt A. at Paul and Anisa's wedding reception yesterday. He said that he read this blog, but he didn't make it all the way through most posts. He's not so interested in book revi...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Richmond
When the Great American Race was going on, several west coast folks were watching various team blogs. I didn't spot Team A2's blog until just now. They've done well in past events, including winnin...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Redmond
I was planning to visit the Seattle area this autumn. MS Puzzlehunt 11 is happening around then. Any Microsofties reading this... any suggestions on how I might volunteer as slave labor for the fol...

Link: writeup of La chasse au tresor de paris
I enjoyed this (English) writeup of a Paris treasure hunt game. Yeah, even though it sounds like it was one of those spot-landmarks-based-on-riddly-descriptions games.Labels: link, puzzlehunts...

Puzzlehunts are Everywhere: even the Googolplex
I just woke up. I thought I was running late for work--it was 9! But it turns out it was 9pm, not 9am. I was most of the way through my morning routine before I noticed it was dark outside. Why i...

Site Update: BANG 17 Writeup
I know, you're bored of hearing about BANG 17, and now you're ready to read about No More Secrets. But I'm really slow, so all I have is a BANG 17 write-up. Featuring cameos by Paul of the BANG wi...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Courts
Peter Sarrett wrote about that scary mine shaft accident in the Shelby Logan's Run game that happened a few years back. Playing these games, you hope that you won't sleepily run around someplace dan...

Site Update: More Library Handcarts
Yeah, I know you want a game report. Yesterday was BANG17, which was pretty awesome. Even if the game hadn't been awesome, it would have been a good excuse to hang out for a day with some folks who...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sweden
Oh, cool! Raymond Chen posted a comment about rebusrally. At least I guess it was Raymond Chen. Maybe it was just some other Swedish/English speaker, and they wanted to mess with my head.Labels: p...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even my Head
Last weekend was a puzzle playtest party for BATH3. BATH is a sort of pot-luck puzzle hunt in which each team makes up one puzzle. Game Control strings all of the puzzles together and runs a game a...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Arkansas
I know, you're still trying to decide which MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle was your favorite, but I nevertheless encourage you to go read David Hill's recap of Midnight Madness 2006. Torrential rain! RC b...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Under One's Nose
The team name "Coed Astronomy" of course invokes memories of "SETEC Astronomy," the mysterious code name from the movie "Sneakers." In the movie, "SETEC Astronomy" turns out to be an anagram for "To...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Book Reports
I read many blogs. According to Google Reader's new Trends feature, in the last 30 days, I've read 1977 items in the past 30 days from 302 feeds. (And I've been cutting back. When the Trends featu...

Link: No Morse Egress
Those wacky kids at Coed Astronomy have just announced an upcoming game No Morse Egress. At last, a game in which you just solve Morse puzzles and never exit. That's going to be so awesome. Jessen...

Site Update: Hogwarts Inside Out
I posted a write-up of the wacky fun times I had in and around the Hogwarts Game. Some of you puzzle-hunt freaks have already found this. Typical. Play-testing with Continental Breakfast: As an exp...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Oklahoma
Oklahoma has it going on. I'm not just talking about Martin Gardner. A Treasure's Trove: A Fairy Tale About Real Treasure For Parents And Children Of All Ages is an illustrated children's book wri...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Sacramento
Team Snout has revealed their secret behind-the-scenes view of The Hogwarts Game. How much planning went into this game? A lot. Go read. And if they spelled your name wrong, you can fix it. Tags...

Names of Nonexistent Puzzle Hunt Teams
I used to think of band names. I couldn't help it. That doesn't happen to me anymore. Now, something else happens. Sometimes on the bus I stop reading, close my eyes, and just think up names for p...

"Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere" is Everywhere
JessicaLa researched an old puzzlehunt, and wrote some interesting things about it. I don't have anything to add to that, but in the tradition of boring bloggers blogging about other bloggers bloggi...

Hogwarts Photos
A few weekends back, I helped to playtest the Hogwarts Game. Then I went to a few puzzle-construction parties. Last weekend, I volunteered for Game Control for the duration of the Game. I'm workin...

Shinteki Write-up Addendum: More Photos
Pete came through with some photos, which I sprinkled into the Decathlon II report. Now the truth is revealed: I was carrying a clipboard, rocking a headlamp, and wearing travel pants with zip-off l...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Auburn
Pete extracted some more Shinteki Decathlon II photos from his camera, and I posted some of them in the write-up. In other puzzley news, Eric Harshbarger's running a puzzlehunt in Auburn in Sep...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even New York City
This write-up of the recent Midnight Madness game in NYC has the title I never dared to use: Some serious nerd-ass shit. There are strange things afoot in Toronto, which are perhaps only tangentiall...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Redmond
I'm still working on that Shinteki Decathlon write-up. I got a draft ready, sent it out to my team-mates. Emily wrote back with a bunch of cool jokes that I'd forgotten. Yeah, I forgot plenty; usu...

I Don't Know as much Braille as I Thought
Today Google announced Google Accessible Search, which favors web pages which are compatible with web browsers that visually-impaired people use. You might think that's pretty awesome, a great step ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere I Go
Long day at work; long bus ride back to my neighborhood; I blearily walk along Irving Street, thinking about dinner. But then I recognize the map-festooned jacket ahead of me. It's Dwight Freund, f...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but not where I am
Four conversations at work yesterday, vaguely remembered: Avani the intern and me: Me: Yeah, that phone conversation I had yesterday must have sounded pretty weird to you. All that stuff about "War...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, from Seattle to Siena
Some awesome folks in Seattle are contributing to their local Game community by setting up a web site with announcements and forums and stuff. Check it out. I fed their RSS feed into my reader so I...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sveden
Shinteki signups are happening. And that is awesome. But if you follow Bay Area treasure hunt stuff, that's probably not news to you. So instead I'll tell you that I sat next to Jonas from Sweden o...

Apprentice Zorg: Addenda, Erratum
In the weeks since I did that write-up of the Apprentice Zorg game, new facts have come to light. Well, I shouldn't act like anyone was trying to conceal these facts. OK, I think most people involv...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Except When Preempted
If you follow The Game/Bay Area puzzle hunt stuff, you might be surprised to see that I posted to this blog this afternoon. I should be with Team Mystic Fish at Menlo Park turning in an application ...

Site Update: McGuffin Ho!
The Burninators ran a Bay Area Night Game last weekend, and I wasn't there. Looking at the BANG 14 puzzles, it was pretty awesome. What was I doing instead? Well, I was working on writing about a ...

Link: The Apprentice
The Mystic Fish team of space mercenaries has signed up as contestants on The Apprentice: Zorg!. Oh, I hope we get in. Oh, I'm on tenterhooks. Or maybe those aren't tenterhooks. Maybe I just consu...

Site Update: Shinteki Decathlon Write-up Posted
It's late November, and NaNoWriMo people around the world are in the final sprint, churning out huge amounts of fiction. Me, I'm just horking up little bits of reportage. For example, I just posted ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Seattle
Because I am a lame-o, I didn't play in the recent Mooncurser's game. But Matthew "Defective Yeti" Baldwin did, and he's a better writer than I am. Go read his write-up. As of today, there's just ...

Home Games
I sit here wheezing and sick at home in front of my computer, cheering myself up with memories of happy days. E.g., the previous six days. Wednesday my department at work had an offsite outing. ...

Baby vs Bathwater: Fight!
Yesterday, I talked with Griff, who I'd seen at a couple of recent puzzle-hunt activites. Griff used to work at Microsoft. He may have interned there, since he mentioned, On the first day of summer...

Switching Gears
Today I felt like I'd lost a fight with the interior of a passenger van, but that wasn't the problem. I'd had a great weekend playing in the Griffiths Game, a 24+ hour puzzle hunt run by the Burnina...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
I stepped off the streetcar two stops early tonight. I wanted to walk a ways. I had recovered from my wild and crazy weekend. I was no longer hobbling around--I could walk. So I wanted to walk, g...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
Peter Tang just rented a new apartment. Today Steven, 'Lene and I went over to paint some of the walls. Watching paint dry is not interesting. So between coats we headed out for lunch. As we walk...

Park Challenge
Today Team Unwavering Resolve (a.k.a. Steven Pitsenbarger, Paul du Bois, and I) played in Park Challenge, a puzzle hunt game organized by the Desert Taxi folks. It was a fun stroll in Golden Gate Pa...

Bay Area Night Game Wiki
Puzzle hunts are everywhere, but it's not easy to find out about them. Some mysterious person started a Bay Area Night Game wiki, so now BANGers will have a place to look for information. A place th...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
I walked from U.C. Berkeley towards the BART station. I was at the tail end of a comics and library run. I'd picked up a few good books, and many good comics. So my pack was heavy and it was hot a...

Book Report: Oxford Pocket American Dictionary
This evening I picked up a copy of the OxFord Pocket American Dictionary. Such false advertising--it's much bigger than any of my pockets. Tags: book | title | foreshadowing |Labels:...